A Phitting End: Nats Climb the Phinal Cliff to Take Season Phinale

Jonathan Papelbon: .2 IP, 2 ER, H, BB, K. It’s almost sad that Papelbon won’t have the chance to blow any saves in the postseason. The happy kind of sadness.

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They let Teddy win. I always knew they’d do it eventually when the Nats got good. They had to. The constant failures of Teddy couldn’t go on forever, lest they devolve further into some kind of dark metaphor for the ultimate pointlessness of existence.

But now that the impossible has been made possible, what is left for this franchise to strive for? The dream of Teddy winning was so fantastical, so quixotic, that all other goals now seem almost trivial. Sure, the Nats could win the World Series. But it was always at least theoretically possible that they could win the World Series. Even in the dark, dark days of ’06 – ’09, the odds of those teams winning the Series at the beginning of the season were greater than zero. The odds of Teddy winning did not exist. If you bet on Teddy winning and he won, this would happen.

Besides, I’m worried that the Nats have not thought through the unintended consequences of Teddy winning a race. I mean, before yesterday, there was nothing you could be more sure of than going to a Nats game and seeing Teddy lose. There were four certainties in life in D.C.: death, taxes, Tom Gorzelanny getting rejected by women, and Teddy always losing.

Now that one of those certainties is gone, though, chaos could break out. People could start thinking that their sureties about the other three things might have been invalid as well. They might start believing in their own immortality and doing incredibly dangerous things. They might think a society can function without any taxes at all and vote for Mitt Romney. Or, most horrifyingly of all, women might convince themselves that maybe Tom Gorzelanny isn’t as ugly as they thought and sleep with him.

Oh god. Think of the terrifying Gorzo-babies!

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Well, it’s been a great year of writing regular season game summaries. To all of our readers who read all 162 (minus a few doubleheaders, plus a few rainouts) game summaries, we at the Zimmerman(n) Telegram thank you. Assuming there are any of you. Otherwise, we just thank ourselves for our own comedic genius, like we do every day.

In conclusion, I would like to make sure that the last word we publish in a regular season Game Recap this year is “Gorzo-babies.”